Summer Spotlight 2023
The Sonoma Regional Academy, in partnership with the Lake County Office of Education, is actively planning for the upcoming school year. One of our goals is to launch equity initiatives tailored to the needs and experiences of our students.
A significant part of our efforts is a collaboration with the Liber Institute. Our focus? Culturally responsive schooling for Native American and Latino students. We're determined to bridge academic and institutional barriers that hinder access to high-quality, culturally affirming education. Our hope is that this understanding of our students' cultures and academic needs will lead to a shift in adult practice that improves students’ experiences and academic outcomes.
Recently, we hosted the Liber Institute team right here in Lake County, California. The visit included engaging activities in our schools, which helped Liber understand our educational environment and identify areas for innovation. The four-day engagement allowed us to foster a collaborative spirit among our educators, administrators, and students.
The Liber Institute led invaluable workshops and discussions about identity, empathy, and equity. These conversations sparked the beginning of a transformative change. Moreover, the visit resulted in unique design artifacts, visual symbols of our shared vision for the future of education in our region.
After their visit, the Liber Institute came up with suggestions based on their observations. Their insights will be a compass in the coming school year as we target areas for improvement. We're optimistic that this partnership will nurture a culture of educational excellence, significantly enhancing our students' learning experiences and outcomes.
21CSLA Regional Academy Spotlight: Sonoma County’s MTSS: EQUITY. Together Initiative
Launched in the Spring of 2022 with a kickoff event involving over 100 local educators, Sonoma County’s MTSS: EQUITY. Together initiative has evolved and expanded this school year to include 14 local school district teams. The purpose of the initiative is to Support Sonoma County school systems to develop and nurture equity-based Multi-Tiered Systems of Support so that all students have the opportunity to learn and thrive.
In order to customize the support and meet participating teams where they are, each district has been assigned a support team made up of the following:
- Educational Support Services Director who serves as the point of contact for participants and promotes coherence between team’s MTSS work and broader district work
- Transformational Coach who supports teams in reflecting on their own beliefs, behaviors, and ways of being
- MTSS Lead who promotes overall project coherence and MTSS content support
Additional content support is being provided by external subject matter experts Josh Bornstein from Fairleigh Dickinson University and Angie Caster from the SWIFT Education Center at the University of Kansas.
While the specific support and cadence of the work is unique to each team, there are certain core components that each is using. One of these is the SWIFT Fidelity Integrity Assessment (FIA), a self-assessment tool schools and local educational agencies (LEAs) can utilize to monitor their progress in relationship to MTSS domains and features. Teams score themselves on priorities for improvement and implementation status. The results are then used to adjust their short-term action plans. Most teams have finished the first iteration of the FIA and are in the process of picking a focus for their work based on the results.
Informed by YouthTruth survey data and other local measures, teams will work to identify a problem of practice and change ideas they can implement and track to ensure they are getting closer to each student receiving the support she/he/they need to thrive academically, socio-emotionally, and behaviorally.
One participant summed up her MTSS: EQUITY. Together experience by sharing, “I really want to emphasize the THANK YOU for helping to give [our] team a positive feeling about approaching MTSS (and data) this year. Sadly, not everyone comes out of work sessions always feeling motivated, but I think [the SCOE team] really helped facilitate this team to feel like we have the groundwork to try!”